Very Rev Prof John McIntyre

12:01AM GMT 22 Dec 2005

The Very Reverend John McIntyre, who died on December 15 aged 89, was Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh for three decades and Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland during Pope John Paul II's visit to the country.

McIntyre was a relatively liberal evangelical figure in the Church of Scotland, but his welcome to the Pope did not go down well with all Presbyterians. While McIntyre greeted John Paul by clasping his hands in the courtyard of the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, in the shadow of the statue of John Knox, the Rev Ian Paisley (author of No Pope Here) tried to push through police barriers, while Pastor Jack Glass urged his supporters to chain themselves to trees in Bellahouston Park, where the Pope was to celebrate Mass.

John McIntyre was born on May 20 1916 at Bathgate, in Lothian, and educated at the town's Academy, before going on to Edinburgh University. He took his MA in Philosophy in 1938 before embarking on a degree in Divinity. He was ordained in the Kirk in 1941 after graduating, and served as locum tenens at Glenorchy and Inishail for two years, before going on to become minister at Fenwick in Ayrshire from 1943 until 1945.

But McIntyre's strength was always as a scholar, rather than as a minister, and after the war he took up the post as Hunter Bailie Professor of Theology at St Andrew's College at the University of Sydney. This was a Presbyterian foundation, in which McIntyre continued to take a close interest throughout his life. In his later years he was saddened by divisions there, which mirrored the arguments over a form of moderated episcopacy proposed for (and rejected by) the Kirk during the 1960s.

He became Principal of St Andrew's in 1950 and three years later completed his doctorate before publishing his first book, St Anselm and his Critics. McIntyre's account of the 11th-century Archbishop of Canterbury made his reputation, and he returned to his native country as Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh in 1956. He proved to be surprisingly effective at the administrative roles in university life, as warden of Edinburgh's halls of residence during the 1960s and Dean of the Faculty of Divinity from 1968 until 1974. During an interregnum in 1973-74, McIntyre served as acting Principal and Vice-Chancellor.

After his second book, The Christian Doctrine of History (1957), McIntyre concentrated on that aspect of theology dealing with the life and role of Jesus in the Church: The Shape of Christology (1966, revised and republished 1998) was highly regarded for its philosophical rigour.

McIntyre's other books included Faith, Theology and Imagination (1987) and Theology after the Storm (1997).

In 1974 he was invited to become Dean of the Order of the Thistle, a post he held until 1989; the following year he took up the post of Chaplain to the Queen in Scotland. Until his retirement from that job in 1986, and afterwards, as an Extra Chaplain, he regularly preached at Craithie, the Royal Family's parish church at Balmoral.

In 1982, McIntyre served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and in that role met the Pope, despite the misgivings of some diehard Protestants. But McIntyre, a quiet and humble figure, had always had an acute sense of the wider Christian church, and declared: "I would hope this spirit of reconciliation will lead us away from the embattled positions that we seem to have maintained, particularly in Scotland, over the centuries."

He married, in 1945, Jessie Buick, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.